Gift aids UCF bid for med school

A developer offers money and land to the university as part of a `medical city' in Lake Nona.

October 4, 2005|By David Damron, Sentinel Staff Writer

Dreams for a medical school at UCF came into sharper focus Monday when a development group pledged $12.5 million in cash and $8 million worth of land to help build the college inside the Lake Nona development in southeast Orlando.

Tavistock Group, the developer behind Isleworth and other upscale and investment projects, announced the gift alongside plans to tailor its massive Lake Nona expansion into a "medical city" that includes the University of Central Florida.

The developers have also left room for other health-care facilities, including one or more hospitals that would be tied to the medical school, officials said. Tavistock officials have been negotiating with several area medical providers to locate a new hospital at Lake Nona. And they are courting the Department of Veterans Affairs to locate its planned 120-bed facility on their property.

The 50-acre school complex would be called the UCF Healthcare Campus at Lake Nona.

"This gives us an absolutely spectacular site for the school," UCF President John Hitt said. "We'll have plenty of room to grow."

The combined gifts are the largest in school history.

When tied to other donations, grants and possible state matching dollars, school officials said they expect to pull together a $58 million funding package. Officials hope it will help them make a strong case for a medical school. The state university system's Board of Governors must approve any new medical schools.

Florida International University in Miami also is vying for its own medical school. With education funding running short, it's unclear whether the board will approve both, or even one, of the proposed schools.

FIU has a $30 million package assembled so far, which also includes private gifts paired with state matching funds, an official there said Monday.

The southern expansion of the Lake Nona development fits loosely within a regional high-tech corridor design that Orange County Mayor Rich Crotty has for the area.

The vision is for the region to become a high-tech hub like Research Triangle Park in North Carolina and Silicon Valley in California. It would be designed around expanded roads -- a southern extension of Avalon Park Boulevard to the BeachLine Expressway, then west to the airport. That, and a new BeachLine Expressway interchange under negotiation, could top $60 million.

The medical-school complex, within Orlando city limits, falls outside the boundaries of Crotty's planned hub. But it's still close enough to bolster the high-tech blueprint he has for the area.

"It's no harm, no foul," Crotty said.

Orlando-area lawmakers said they would wait until after the Board of Governors rules on the UCF medical-school idea -- possibly as early as a Nov. 17 meeting -- before putting together a funding proposal for the 2006 Legislature.

Lawmakers say they don't want a repeat of the controversy that clouded Florida State University's push for a chiropractic school -- rejected earlier this year by the board.

Lawmakers had tucked $9 million into the 2004 state budget for the school without it getting the blessing of university-system officials, sparking critics to deride the move as pork-barrel politics.

"Getting approval from the Board of Governors has been our focus," said House Majority Leader Andy Gardiner, R-Orlando, of the medical-school project.

Hitt said that the Tavistock pledge allows UCF to put together a funding package that would ease some of the board's financial concerns.

"What we have understood is that we need to be able to say . . . that we can cover the costs of building our facility," Hitt said.

UCF would use a $10 million donation from car dealership magnate Al Burnett and his wife, Nancy, along with other state matching and construction funds, to build the Burnett Biomedical Sciences College building inside the Lake Nona project.

The 113,000-square-foot Burnett structure would house labs and faculty offices. A second 130,000-square-foot instructional building and a 60,000-square-foot library would also be part of the initial project.

Construction could start early next year. Classes could begin, if approved, as early as 2008, with as many as 120 graduates a year.

Tavistock owns about 6,900 acres around the Central Florida GreeneWay, west of Narcoossee Road, but east of the Orlando International Airport.

"Lake Nona is a natural fit," Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer said. "The same type of infrastructure that would have been beneficial to the Scripps project brings it credibility."

Roughly the same Lake Nona space was tentatively set aside for the massive Scripps Research Institute, a biotech-research center that eventually opted in 2003 to build in Palm Beach County.

Still, Hitt said a new medical school could have a Scripps-like economic ripple effect in Central Florida, touting studies that contend other medical schools in Florida see an average annual impact of more than $2.7 billion locally.

Meanwhile, Central Florida lawmakers said during next spring's legislature session, a modest amount of planning, engineering and development money might be sought from state taxpayers, if university officials OK the school. Larger shares of funding and operating dollars would be needed in future years, they said.

Towson Fraser, spokesman for House Speaker Allan Bense, R-Panama City, said that even with Monday's announcement, the long-term cost of a UCF school was still an unknown.

"I don't know how far what they've got now really goes," Fraser said. "The Legislature is going to have to look at operating money, accreditation, and all that it takes to run a medical school. There's a lot that goes into this."